awe in his deportment that
chilled me. He opened the door of the drawing-room with extreme caution
and gentleness, bowed, and closed it upon me. As I stood near the
threshold, the last low tones of some plaintive and soothing melody,
sung in a tone much more subdued than that of common conversation, died
faintly away to the vibrating of a chord of the harp; and a youthful
figure, bathed in a misty light from the window recess, rose, and moving
silently across the room, without once casting her eyes upon myself,
disappeared through a door parallel to the one by which I had entered.

Whilst I remain in the darker portion of this saloon, it is necessary
for me to describe it. I could not have imagined such a combination of
taste and luxury. At first, I was almost overpowered by the too genial
warmth of the apartment, and the aromatic and rose-imbued odours that
filled it. I trod on, and my step sank into, a yielding carpet, which
seemed to be elastic under my feet, and which glowed with a thousand
never fading, though mimic flowers. The apartment was not crowded,
though I saw candelabra, vases, and side-tables of the purest marble,
supported upon massive gilt pedestals. In all this there was nothing
singular--it was the work of the upholsterer; but the beautiful
arrangement was the work of a presiding taste.

At the further end of this superb room, stood two fluted and gilded
pilasters, and two pillars of the Corinthian order, the capitals of
which reached the ceiling: but they were not equidistant from each
other, the space from the pilaster to the pillar on either side being
much less than that between the two pillars. Between the two former
there were placed statues of the purest marble; what fabled god or
goddess they were sculptured to represent, I know not; I only felt that
they personified male and female beauty. I was too agitated to permit
myself to notice them accurately. Between this screen of pillars and
statues, hung two distinct sets of drapery, the one of massive and
crimson silk curtains, entirely opaque by their richness and their
weight of texture, that drew up and aside with golden cords; the other
of a muslin almost transparent, how managed I had no time to examine.

When the draperies fell in their gorgeous and graceful folds to the
ground, they made of the saloon two parts, and the division that
embraced the windows had then all the privacy of a secluded apartment.
When the curtains were